So please, don't talk to us about foolish. We've seen foolish.

Foolish is believing that the same approach which has failed time after time is one day going to produce a championship. It just doesn't work that way.

So here's my guarantee: Unless Jones has suddenly decided to drastically lower his Super Bowl-or-bust standards, he WILL fire Phillips. It's just a matter of when and whether he wants to go through this same miserable feeling next year.

I say do it now and get the inevitable over with so that the Cowboys can move on to their destiny before their window of opportunity passes them by.

This isn't about whether assistant Jason Garrett stays or goes, either. This is about knowing how to coach when it matters.

Wade Phillips is a nice guy, but he just doesn't get it. And at this stage, I'm not sure he ever will. There's a reason he has a great regular-season resume and an 0-4 career record in the playoffs.

He showed rare insight into his own psyche yesterday at his final pep rally of the year at Valley Ranch.

"I'm a person who believes in people and there will be those who will say that will be my downfall, because I believe in players too much," Phillips said.

Amen.

There are absolutely worse things than believing in people, unless you're the head coach of the Dallas Cowboys and you have to know when it's time to lead.

To a man, not a single player — or at least those who showed up in the locker room yesterday — could pinpoint a reason why the Cowboys turned belly up in December and never righted the ship.

"If I knew the answer to that, I'd be here indefinitely and Jerry would pay me a lot of money," Greg Ellis said.

Let me suggest then that this is a soft team and that's a direct reflection of a soft coach.

I can hear the rebuttals now and some of them, naturally, came yesterday from the very players that Phillips put his trust in.

"You can drive a player into the ground or you can be laid-back and relaxed and you can put everything on your players, and that's what he did," said Patrick Crayton, one of those who let Phillips down Sunday. "He treated us like men."

Unfortunately, they didn't play like it Sunday when it mattered.

Crayton, who talked big, had two key drops, fumbled a punt and broke off his route on the second-to-the-last play of the game, allowing Tony Romo to overthrow what might have been a game-winning TD pass.

But the fact is, the Cowboys were a much more talented team this season than any Parcells ever had here, and Big Bill was enmeshed in a four-year project to change an entire culture, much like Jimmy Johnson and Jones did beginning in 1989.

Let me borrow one of Parcells' favorite horse racing analogies. A jockey has to know when to loosen the reins and when to apply the whip. Every coach understands that the race can be lost at any point but that nothing is more important than the stretch. That's when a team must be at its best. That's when a good jockey goes to the whip.

I'm not sure Phillips even has a whip.

"From Thanksgiving on, the season becomes a sprint," said a wiser voice than mine yesterday at Valley Ranch.

Let me pose another question. If Parcells were still head coach of the Cowboys, would Romo have made his widely publicized trip to Cabo? Would another group of players have spent the weekend partying in Las Vegas? Forget Parcells, would it have happened under Jimmy Johnson?

I can assure you, it wouldn't have happened. Johnson's legacy is "asthma fields" and Super Bowls. Phillips' is Camp Cupcake, Coach Pompom and 0-4 in the playoffs.

It's not that Romo's Mexico trip or the Las Vegas partying were directly responsible for the Cowboys' loss Sunday. It's the attitude that's been cultivated by a coach who sincerely believes that 13 regular-season wins translates into a successful season.

The only thing that makes a season that started out 12-1 successful is a deep playoff run and even that has to translate into a Super Bowl at some point.

When the Cowboys went into a December tailspin, Phillips ignored it and made excuses. You can't correct a problem unless you admit you have one, and the Cowboys' offense, the unit that had carried them all season, was clearly in trouble.

Having played the Patriots tough, having vanquished the Packers and the Giants twice, having beaten the Eagles in Philadelphia, the players Phillips trusted clearly believed they could relax and glide into the playoffs. It's the head coach's job to slap them cross-eyed when that happens.

Instead, Phillips rhapsodized about his team's 13 victories and, even as late as Monday, its status as one of the NFL's "Elite Eight" as he put it, noting that this Cowboys team had advanced further in the playoffs—by not winning a single postseason game—than any Dallas team since 1996.

Then he watched helplessly as his team of 12 Pro Bowlers folded in the second half against a team the Cowboys had beaten soundly twice during the regular season.

Hip, hip, hooray.

"When you win 13 games, the arrow's pointing up," Phillips insisted yesterday.

No, Wade. The arrow is pointed at you and the question isn't whether Jerry Jones will let it fly.